Please share your immediate response to the image before reading the photographer’s intent (obscured text below) or other comments. The photographer seeks a genuinely unbiased first impression.
Questions to guide your feedback
Creating impact in a photo is something that I strive to achieve.
These Razorbills were very active, they were constantly flying, landing, flying again.
This gave me an ideal opportunity to place myself in a position where I thought I could get an interesting angle of them passing overhead.
I hope that it has some impact.
An hour or so later two white tailed eagles arrived, then they all disappeared!
Other Information
Please leave your feedback before viewing the blurred information below, once you have replied, click to reveal the text and see if your assessment aligns with the photographer. Remember, this if for their benefit to learn what your unbiased reaction is.
Technical Details
Olympus OM-1
Panasonic/Leica 100-400 @ 110mm
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
Vision and Purpose:
Conceptual:
Emotional Impact and Mood:
Composition:
Balance and Visual Weight:
Depth and Dimension:
Color:
Lighting:
Processing:
Technical:
The composition has a lot of impact, Ryan with the appearance that the Razorbills are flying straight at you. The one weakness I see in the image is that the bird that my eyes go to first (circled in red below) is not in crisp focus and it have to look up in the frame to get one that is in focus. You don’t mention your aperture or shutter speed, but if you had enough light, stopping down quite a bit might have put more birds in crisp focus. Alternatively, setting manual focus at a distance that would put a bird reasonably large in the frame and just blasting away as they flew at you might have given you more choice in composition.
Hi Ryan, my initial reaction is cool to see the birds flying at us like this though I wish more were in focus. I could see cropping some from the bottom to keep more of our attention on the incoming birds.
This is a real nice image, Ryan.
I agree with the idea for cropping off the bottom.
Razor pills are very cool birds. I saw a lot in Iceland.
I’m inclined to agree with Dennis on this one.
While a I agree with @Dennis_Plank about that one bird being out of focus, it is not the first thing my eye focuses on. My eye is initially gravitating to the bird closest to the LRC, is the biggest and is very close the 1/3 power point in the frame. Further, this is clearly an action shot, and given that they are all flying towards us, we can’t expect all of them to be in simultaneous focus, the out of focus / blurry parts is what gives this photo a dynamic feel. I like it as presented.
Thanks for all of your comments, as always these are considered and helpful.
My aim was to try to fill the frame with a random pattern of birds and I wasn’t focusing enough on focus! (but thanks for your comments as well Youseff).
On reflection I should have closed down the aperture and taken the resultant hit in ISO. The manual focus point is also an interesting idea, I do sometimes use this when waiting for animals to arrive in frame, but on this occasion standing up in a tiny moving boat it didn’t seem practical.
Here’s a tighter crop, I like it but maybe it focuses too much on the unfocused!
Happy holidays everyone.
